Primary Menu

I’m pleased to announce that you can now get Sass rolled into _s by simply checking the box on Underscores.me. The community has driven this change through pull requests and forks.

It’s taken a little while, but we wanted to do it right. As with the rest of Underscores, we wanted to keep it as simple as possible, offering any extra scripting with a checkbox option rather than imposing it on all developers. Not everyone compiles or uses Sass the same, so _s shouldn’t force anyone to follow one path or another. In this sense, the Sass provided takes a pure approach, not requiring Compass or any other scripts.

Worth noting along with this addition is that the Github version of _s is now purely for development. We strongly recommend only using Underscores.me to download _s, going forward.

Just like with _s itself, the Sass it uses will probably change and evolve with time. What is in place now is a structure, a starting point. Any issues, or requests can be posted on Github, and you can even roll your own using a fork. Just like _s is your theme’s starting point, you can take the Sass in any direction you want.

Kelly, a colorful personal-blogging theme designed by Automattic’s Kelly Hoffman, is now available for download from the WordPress.org Theme Directory. Here’s how Kelly explains the creative inspiration for her namesake:

I really wanted to keep it simple but fun, which is why I went with bold splashes of color and large type. I went with the complementary color palate of reddish orange and green as a fun reference to my red hair and green eyes.

Over the last few months, Automattic has released a half-dozen new free themes in the WordPress.org theme directory, ranging from stylish personal blogging themes to photo-intensive portfolio themes.

Meet the class of 2014:

Designed by Automattic’s Dan Hauk,Pictorico is a snazzy portfolio theme with large featured images and a classy post slider.

Caroline Moore launched three flexible blog-oriented themes of her own design: Fictive, as well as Quadra and Circa, both child themes of Hexa. All take attractive advantage of post formats, with charming use of colorful geometric icons throughout.

Tonal is Tammie Lister‘s debut solo theme in the WordPress.org directory. Tonal’s graceful, minimalist look also comes with a bonus: change the site’s background color to a shade of your liking and the theme automatically adjusts the typography to ensure your text stays clean and readable.

Musicians have been taking full advantage of Singl‘s strong, contemporary vibe. Crafted by Thomas Guillot, it serves its creative niche with polish and panache.

With Underscores’ growing popularity and continuing maturation as an open source project, we decided to take the next step and open up commit access to contributors outside of Automattic. Please join me in congratulating Philip Arthur Moore on becoming the first external committer to an Automattic project on GitHub.

Philip has been a fairly easy choice as we obviously know him well here at Automattic. He was with us for over three years and a driving factor in everything theme related during his time with us. But more importantly, he continues to care about Underscores and contribute in discussions and patches, and we know about his theme development skills and passion for world class themes.

We’re much more conservative with our Underscores goals and dreams than most people wanting to contribute, so it is important to us that committers share these values and understand where we see the project headed. We have no doubt that that is the case with Philip, who helped shaping Underscores from the day it started. Andrew Nacin recently published a post about how the WordPress project chooses committers, and while WordPress and Underscores are vastly different open source projects, there is still a lot to take away from it—especially around the qualities of a great contributor—that also applies to this project.

Underscores just recently celebrated its second birthday. It has become an integral part of many projects, not only at Automattic, but for theme developers all over the world. So we’re exited to have Philip back in a leading role and continue this journey with us!

If you’ve read my previous articles you’ll recognize the title of this post. For those of you who are new, these are my thoughts behind the themes I’ve designed. This time, I’d like to talk about Forefront — a responsive Business theme.

Post navigation

A recent creation from Automattic’s Takashi Irie,Resonar is an elegant theme perfect for fashion, food, or design blogs. Its layout showcasing full-screen featured images works especially well for longform posts with large images. Combine strong images with Resonar’s beautiful typography to craft posts that make an immediate visual impact.

A new theme designed by Automattic’s Tammie Lister is now available in the WordPress.org directory. Coherent‘s elegant slide-out panel tucks away navigation, a social menu, and widgets, keeping visitors’ focus on your posts. Optional full-screen featured images let you showcase strong photos or other graphics.

Delve into the Underscores starter theme in Jeff Chandler’s WP Tavern interview with Automattic code wrangler Konstantin Obenland. Find out how it’s meant to be used in theme development and how to contribute to the project, and explore a sampling of the outstanding sites built using Underscores.